Wow! What a great time last night celebrating Mary’s accomplishment of receiving her Master’s degree and also celebrating Obis One black garlic! A great group of friends and relatives sitting around a table enjoying food, wine and each other! We started with a couple of spreads to put on crackers, baguettes and bread sticks – Black Garlic Hummus and White Bean, Olive and Black Garlic Tapenade – along with nuts, pickles, olves and Deviled Eggs – topped with a little black garlic … Then on to Black Garlic Beef Burgundy with lots of crusty bread to sop up the gravy. Followed that with a big salad with Black Garlic Vinaigrette and some lovely cheese brought over by Gregg Tate. All of the guests sampled cloves of black garlic and loved … Read entire article »

Getting ready to go to the beach on Saturday for the week, so to get in the spirit, I’ll make something from the sea! How about crabcakes? Always a hit and easy to make. Crab meat is on sale at the Harris Teeter, so I’ll grab a pound or so and make crab cakes. I found a recipe that uses Panko bread crumbs – I love their extra crunch when frying, and I think they’ll work well with crab to give it some body, but without too much bread in the actual cake. Panko Crab Cakes and Tartar Sauce also includes a recipe for homemade tartar sauce – though I always thought that was just mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish! This recipe looks like it has a little more depth … Read entire article »

The question right now (at 8:45p.m.) is not “What’s for dinner”, but “How was dinner tonight?” Simple answer – delicious! Friday and Beautiful Wife not working today – also had Big Girl + BF, Little Miss and Only Son. I decided to go healthy (sort of) and make a Creamy Pasta Primavera with lots of good veggies and a creamy sauce (with heavy cream – that’s the “sort of” qualifier). I love long pasta and especially like linguine, so I made the primavera sauce and finished in my giant pan with cooked linguine and lots of fresh parm cheese. It was a successful meal, that’s for sure. And not only did I make the main course, but made dessert as well. Ice cream! We all scream for it! Little Miss … Read entire article »

There is still a bounty of beautiful, ripe tomatoes at our house. Large, small, roma, etc., they keep coming! And nobody is complaining! This past week, I made Tomato and Cheddar Pie for dinner one night. It was rich, with layers of sharp cheddar cheese, tomatoes and a mayonnaise/dill filling. However, I did not make my pie crust from scratch. I bought the rolled-up pie dough things from where the canned biscuits are at the grocery store – they worked out fine. It was delicious – hot and bubbly from the oven, a real hit. We had some leftovers and like many casserole-y type dishes, it was almost better heated up the next day.
Yesterday, I ventured into new territory and made Tomato Ice Cream. I think the end result is … Read entire article »

The harvest continues unabated! We have now gotten out the big, beautiful bowl we use for large quantities of pasta or salad and filled it with fresh tomatoes and using it as a centerpiece for the dining room table! Lots of ‘maters! So the other day I made a Simple Cooked Tomato Salsa – though I only used four tomatoes. Still with eating a tomato sandwich for lunch every day and finding new recipes for tomatoes, we’ll enjoy every fat, delicious one of them. Heck, we might even have a half-bushel to bring to the beach in a few weeks to share with our 30-some relatives we’ll visit with then.
But tonight, I think I’ll use the Simple Cooked Tomato Salsa as an ingredient in a nice, big pot of black … Read entire article »

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce
Our backyard is becoming a bounty of wonderful summer vegetables – cucumbers, zucchini, squash and lots of tomatoes! Beautiful Wife has been working “the back 40″ and we are reaping the benefits. There are already 20-30 plum (roma) tomatoes sitting on the counter, so today I will make homemade pasta sauce. I’ll stick with an all-veggie recipe so everyone can enjoy! I found a recipe that sounds delicious and not too awful time-consuming. It’ll be a couple of hours of slow simmering, so it will have that “all day” taste (I hope!), but don’t want the stove on all day in the house. Even with air conditioning, it is a hot day, so a couple of hours slaving over a hot stove will be enough for me … … Read entire article »

Kind of an overcast afternoon here and I’ve got a bunch of leftovers in the fridge. Tonight will be what we call “pick up sticks” – AKA leftover night. I’ll make a big salad with greens, spinach and maybe some protein (chicken, ham, cheese?), but we have mac and cheese, a zucchini and squash pasta sauce with linguine, and a pasta dish I made last night. Big Girl sent me some recipes she had collected over time and one of them was Mom’s Baked Chicken & Spinach Pasta. The picture looks delicious, so I decided to give it a try. I followed the recipe very diligently, but I just wasn’t crazy about the result. To my taste, it needed a bit more moisture of some sort – something to sauce … Read entire article »

Last night, I whipped up a pasta dish – basically a vegetable-filled, red sauce. Sauteed onions, zucchini, yellow squash and garlic, let that cook down a bit, then added a couple of jars of sauce (semi-homemade!). Added a bit of extra seasoning and let if simmer for a while to marry the flavors and soften the veggies. I then added cooked linguini to the sauce, finished the dish in the pan and served it up with finely shredded parmesan and garlic bread. It was really good.
Tonight gonna’ be making fish tacos. I’m going to experiment a little with the fish – in the freezer I have some tilapia, salmon and scallops. Some fish taco recipes call for broiling/grilling the fish and others for battering and frying – the deep-frying I … Read entire article »

Yay, it’s Friday! A hot Friday here in the National Capital Area, so I’m thinking of cooking something for dinner that I can largely prepare a bit earlier in the day and then serve at dinner, after the house (and me) cool off after slaving over the hot stove. My favorite grocery store had a special on (frozen) shrimp last week – buy two 2-pound bags of shrimp and get three free (what?)! Each bag was $27.98, so it was a total of about 56 dollars, but ended up with 10 pounds of 21-30 shrimp – so even a decent size shrimp.
So what to make? Hmmm … Maybe something that everyone (Beautiful Wife, Big Girl + BF, LIttle Miss, Only Son and usually a straggler or two, especially on Friday) … Read entire article »

Okay, Wednesday morning and thinking about dinner tonight. Made (or tried to make) felafel last night. Mixed up the dough and started to fry, but the little rounds kind of came apart in the oil. Maybe oil wasn’t hot enough, so I let it heat a little more and then rolled the chickpea dough rounds in flour before dropping in hot fat. It worked! I think I wasted some of the dough, so didn’t end up with as much felafel I had hoped for, so I went and got a cheese pizza at Two Chefs! I was feeding six adults (Beautiful Wife, Big Girl + boyfriend, Little Miss + friend of hers, me), so I needed additional foodstuffs. I had earlier made the tahini sauce, which on the fried felafel … Read entire article »